Commvault Best Practices on Nutanix

I first remember seeing Commvault in 2007 in the pages of Network World and thought it looked pretty interesting then. At the time I was an CA ARCserve junky and prayed everyday I didn’t have to restore anything. Almost 10 years latter tape is still around, virtualization spawned countless backup vendors and Cloud now makes a easy backup target. Today Commvault is still relevant and plays in all of the aforementioned spaces and like most tech companies we have our own overlap with them to some degree. For me Commvault just has so many options it’s almost a problem of what to use where and when.

The newly released Best Practice Guide with Commvault talks about some of the many options that should be used with Nutanix. Probably the big things that would stand out in my mind if I was new to Nutanix and then read the guide would be the use of a proxy on every host and some of the caveats around Intellisnap.

Proxy On Every Host

What weights more? A pound of feathers or a pound of bricks? The point here is you need a proxy regardless and the proxy is sized on how much data you will be backing up. So instead of having 1 giant proxy you now have smaller proxies that are distributed across the cluster. Smaller proxies can read from local Hot SSD tier and limit network traffic so they can help to limit bottlenecks in your infrastructure.

IntelliSnap is probaly one of the most talked about Commvault features. IntelliSnap allows you to create a point-in-time application-consistent snapshot of backup data on the DSF. The backup administrator doesn’t need to log on to Prism to provide this functionality. A Nutanix-based snapshot is created on the storage array as soon as the VMware snapshot is completed; the system then immediately removes the VMware snapshot. This approach minimizes the size of the redo log and shortens the reconciliation process to reduce the impact on the virtual machine being backed up and minimize the storage requirement for the temporary file. It also allows near-instantaneous snapshot mounts for data access.

With IntelliSnap it’s important to realize that it was invented at a time where LUNS ruled the storage workload. IntelliSnap in some sense turns Nutanix’s giant volumes/containers the hypervisors sees into a giant LUN. Behind the scenes when Intellisnap is used it snaps the whole container regardless if the VMs are being backed up or not. So you should do a little planning when using IntelliSnap. This is ok since IntelliSnap should be used for high transnational VMs and not every VM in the data center. I just like to point out that streaming backups with CBT is still a great choice.